telling the story with my whole heart

What if people told the truth?

Would one person feel less isolated, trying to nurse her infant, as she herself cries uncontrollably, not at all feeling this overwhelming maternal love everyone told her she would?

Would a divorced parent find solace that another divorced parent hates Christmas and spends most of the holiday crying because the day reminds her of how much her life no longer looks like a Currier & Ives commercial, of how much she has lost?

Would the stay-at-home mother, in that most beautiful home, tell someone that her husband was leaving her, and that she was scared of losing everything and that she couldn’t sleep and was so angry and didn’t trust herself around her 3 children and needed help?

I don’t know the answers here, but I do know that feeling isolated and alone contributes to feelings of depression and compounds it. I also know that our default response when someone asks “How are you?” or “How was your weekend?” is “I’m great, how are you?” or “It was fun, how about yours?” And that, as a culture, at least in the US, we seem to prize happiness (“the pursuit of “) above everything else, and when we don’t feel happy, assume that there must be something wrong with us, that we are doing something wrong.

What if we risked answering today’s “How are you” questions more truthfully? What if we didn’t pretend so much?

#DareToExcel

Craft a burning question of possibility. – the was the first task of Tracking Wonder’s the 30-Day Dare To Excel Challenge, an invitation to top-notch innovators, creatives, and companies to advance a big idea with a few minutes of action every day.

JEFFREY DAVIS researches, interviews, and works with creative innovators, scientists, and social psychologists to discover how creatives flourish in times of challenge and change.